Above and beyond

Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place

by Rita Barnard

New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 234 pages

Rita Barnard's new book goes far beyond her initial sketch of it "as an effort to articulate the impact of apartheid on literary and cultural production" (3). It is a comprehensive survey of South African literature of the apartheid years and immediately after, and it provides us with a formulation of the politics of place (per her subtitle) that not only illuminates the South African situation but also contributes enormously to conversations about "the reassertion of the spatial in critical social theory" (5).

Barnard, originally from South Africa and now a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, opens with an introduction that provides the traditional chapter overview but then disarms us with her candor about her own position as an expatriate academic. Having initiated a discussion about "the situatedness of textual production and consumption" (3), Barnard situates herself and, in doing so, neatly squashes any objections to her authority and makes manifest the personal nature of this academic endeavor:

    Of course, my telling of this story involves something of a myth of
    origins. But I tell it as a way of suggesting the extent to which
    this book is one replete with personal emotions--with a desire to
    finally understand the country I have often despaired for and even
    hated, as well a yearning for a new country, full of fresh
    political, cultural, and experiential possibilities.... I can only
    hope that this book does something to demonstrate my conviction that
    the long-distance view might be a productive one to adopt in a world
    where the local may not be erased ... but where it is increasingly
    penetrated and shaped by influences and interests from far
    away. (14)

Barnard starts with a chapter on J. M. Coetzee's writing that uses the spatial concept of the "dream topography" to explore the "ethical and political dimensions of Coetzee's novels" (26). This is followed by two chapters on Nadine Gordimer's stories and novels: "Leaving the House of the White Race," which traces Gordimer's "time-honored strategy of ungrounding any notion of domestic normality" (69), and "Of Trespassers and Trash," which uses Michel de Certeau's idea of a "proper place" from The Practice of Everyday Life to talk about dispossession (being out of place), resistance, and restitution. Chapter 4, "A Man's Scenery," tries to complicate the voguish conception of Athol Fugard as old-fashioned and sentimental by paying closer attention to his concern with spatial deprivation. Whereas in the Gordimer and Fugard chapters Barnard covers much of their writings, in her Miriam Tlali chapter, "Beyond the Tyranny of Place," she reads a single novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, framing it with analyses of Mamphela Ramphele's study of migrant hostels, A Bed Called Home, and Fatima Dike's play So What's New? in order to highlight Tlali's reclamation of space within a tyranny of place. Barnard ends with a chapter on two Zakes Mda novels:

    Ways of Dying and The Heart of Redness ... map out the location of
    culture in postapartheid South Africa: they enable a meditation on
    the transformation of the country's cultural geography from the old
    landscapes of oppression to the new mediascapes of leisure and
    tourism, which have often subsumed the old sites of deprivation in a
    new logic of display. (150)

The book's ostensible structure moves us from author to author and text to text. Its deeper drive, however, has to do with the interpenetrations of discursive and social structures, so that Barnard uses the texts to illuminate historical, political, and economic realities and vice versa. All of this is done through the lens of space and place, producing an interdisciplinary set of readings that focuses the literature in sharp new ways. For instance, wrapping up an analysis of Gordimer's novel July's People, Barnard writes of the character Maureen Smales:

    Painful as it may be, it is surely necessary for her to confront
    these connections and to abandon apartheid's distorted map of human
    relations; a map that, as we have seen, extended no further than the
    suburban garden, and was deceptive even about that which its fences
    enclosed. The much-debated final scene of the novel is, then,
    profoundly ambiguous but not altogether hopeless. Maureen runs
    toward the sound of a mysterious helicopter, lured, we are told, by
    the illusory promise of "a kitchen, a house just the other side of
    the next tree" (JP 160). In this regard her running is a retreat.
    But it is also true that her dash toward the helicopter dissolves
    all of her old attachments.... The novel thus eschews any final
    (en)closure and seems to affirm an open-ended, transient, and
    migratory existence, a mode of being that is perhaps peculiarly
    African and also (as has been argued) typically
    postcolonial. (65-66)